DESTROYING AFGHAN POPPY FIELDS IS LUNACY

Most people in Afghanistan are farmers. If Hamid Karzai's
Western-backed government in Kabul is to survive, it must have their support.

So, not destroying their main cash crop should be an obvious priority
for Karzai's foreign supporters. But what the hell, let's go burn some poppies.

"We need to realize that we could actually fail here," said Lt.-Gen.
David Richards, British commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, last
week. In southwestern Afghanistan, where 7,000 British, Canadian and
Dutch troops were committed during the summer to contain a resurgent
Taliban, the guerrillas now actually stand and fight, even against
NATO's overwhelming firepower and air power. And everything that
moves on the roads gets ambushed.

The combat in Afghanistan is more severe and sustained than anything
seen in Iraq, for the Taliban fight in organized units with good
light infantry weapons. In the past month, Britain and Canada have
lost about half as many soldiers killed in Afghanistan as the United
States lost in Iraq in the same period, out of a combat force perhaps
one-10th as big.

Concern in Europe about Western casualties in Afghanistan is already
so great that none of the NATO countries were willing to commit more
troops to the fighting when their defence chiefs met in Belgium on
Sept. 13, despite an urgent appeal from Richards for 2,500 more
combat troops. Most of them just don't believe that a few thousand
more troops will save the situation in Afghanistan.

To limit their casualties, the British have already abandoned their
original "section-house" strategy of spreading troops through the
villages of the south-west in small groups that would provide
security and help with reconstruction. They were just too vulnerable,
so they have been pulled back to bigger base camps and replaced by
Afghan police (who will make deals with the local Taliban forces to
save their lives.)

The rapid collapse of the Taliban government in the face of America's
air power and its locally purchased allies in late 2001 created a
wholly misleading impression that the question of whose country is
this, anyway, had been settled. Afghanistan has always been an easy
country to invade but a hard country to occupy. Resistance to foreign
intervention takes time to build. But the Afghans defeated British
occupations twice, and a Soviet occupation - when those empires were
at the height of their power. The Afghans are well on the way to
doing it again.

Perhaps if the United States and its allies had smothered the country
in troops and drowned it in aid at the outset, the rapid increase in
security and prosperity would have created a solid base of support
for the government they installed under President Karzai. But most of
the available troops were sent off to invade Iraq instead, and most
of the money went to American contractors in Iraq, not American
contractors in Afghanistan (though little of it reached the local
people in either case).

The various warlords who allied themselves with the United States are
the real power in most of Afghanistan, and in the traditional
opium-producing areas in the south they have encouraged a return to
poppy-farming (which had been almost eradicated under the Taliban) in
order to get some cash flow. Poor farmers struggling under staggering
loads of debt were happy to cooperate, and by now Afghanistan is
producing about 90 per cent of the world's opium, the raw material for heroin.

That's the price you pay for disrupting the established order, and
the United States should just have paid it. There's no real point in
destroying poppies in Afghanistan, because they'll just get planted
elsewhere: So long as heroin is illegal the price will be high enough
that people somewhere will grow it. Even if it is ideologically
impossible for the United States to end its foolish, unwinnable "war
on drugs," it should have turned a blind eye in Afghanistan.

But it didn't. For the past five years a shadowy outfit called
DynCorps has been destroying the poppy fields of southern
Afghanistan's poorest farmers with U.S. and British military support.
This was an opportunity the Taliban could not resist, and the
alliance between Taliban fighters and poppy farmers (now often the
same people) is at the root of the resurgent guerrilla war in the south.

It begins to smell like the last year or two in a classic
anti-colonial war, when the guerrillas start winning and local
players begin to hedge their bets.

Karzai, seeking allies who will help him survive the eventual
pull-out of Western troops, is appointing gangsters and drug-runners
as local police chiefs and commanders. The end-game has started and
the foreigners seem bound to lose.

Only one chance remains: Legalize poppy cultivation,then buy the
entire crop, and at premium prices. Break the link between the
Taliban and the poppy farmers.

Otherwise, the first Afghan cities will probably start to fall into
Taliban hands within the next year to 18 months.